It’s very gratifying. Not that folks weren’t doing this before, but I don’t think there’s any question that our book has a role in popularizing the practice – and all credit on that score goes to Ann Engelhart, who had the idea in the first place.

Our first visit, back in 2006, the stop at St. John Lateran was part of a day led for us by then-seminarian and anonymous blogger Zadok. Remember at the time, my now-almost-13-year old was a bit over a year and was being transported everywhere one someone’s back. We traded him off. It was a great day, but exhausting as we walked and walked – and if you have been to Rome, you know that the walk between St. John Lateran and St. Mary Major is uphill…way…uphill.

I have often referred to the enormous statuary inside St. John Lateran, in which each of the apostles are represented, as is traditional, with the instruments of their martyrdom, St. Bartholomew depicted holding his own skin, as he is traditionaly remembered as having been flayed.

As interesting as the church itself is the baptistry, which is enormous.

We were in Rome right around Ash Wednesday, and the day we were at St. John Lateran was a Sunday, so the plaza around the church – the area around the obelisk (the oldest Egyptian obelisk in Rome) – was filled with children dressed in costumes playing games at booths and so on – the Bishop of Rome’s church just like any other parish church during this carnevale

We ended up at St. Mary Major during Vespers, and there in a side chapel was Cardinal Law.

Back in 2012, the boys and I returned to Rome – in late November as a matter of fact. My main memory from that trip’s visit to St. John Lateran was a rather aggressive beggar inside the church who was approaching visitors and berating them when they didn’t give – he ended up being driven out rather forcefully by security.

Jumping back to the 2006 visit, we had a bit of trouble finding Zadok when we first arrived, so we killed a bit of time near the ancient city walls, doing what we do best on trips.

It is not Christ’s will that the Church be reduced to a private club, and a Church that acts contrary to Christ’s will is not the Church, but the anti-church and an anti-church is not the servant of Christ, but of the anti-christ.

The scriptures assigned for today are all in their own unique way about the temple. Remember, our religion is not a religion that worships in assembly halls or entertainment venues, our religion is a temple religion and at the center of the Church’s way of life is the temple.

Today’s scriptures describe what sort of temple in which we worship.

The first scripture is an excerpt from the New Testament Book of Revelation.

This scripture presented a vision of the temple of heaven and the earthly temple of the Church on earth is meant to be a representation of the temple of heaven.

This temple is the Mass. The Mass is not just an expression of the community, but it is the community of the Church worshipping God as he wants to be worshipped. The ritual of the Mass is meant as an expression on earth of the worship of heaven, not as simply an act of communal self-expression. This is the difference between true worship and false worship or what can be called faith-based entertainment. True worship honors God in Christ as he wants to be worshipped. False worship seeks to honor ourselves and uses the worship of God to give sanction to this self-reference.

The worship of the Church in the temple of the Mass makes heavenly realities present and available to us, we receive these heavenly realities in all the signs and symbols of the rituals of our worship, but most importantly, we receive the divine presence of God himself in the gift of the Blessed Sacrament.

And this is St. Paul’s point in his first letter to the Corinthians.

A temple is a dwelling place, a house for God. When St. Paul makes reference to the Christian as being a dwelling place for God or a kind of portable temple, his meaning is that we Christians receive the divine presence of God through our participation in the Eucharist. Having received the Eucharist we become, literally, bearers of the divine presence of Jesus Christ, living sanctuaries for God.

The beauty and the harmony of churches, destined to render praise to God, invites us human beings too, though limited and sinful, to convert ourselves to form a “cosmos”, a well-ordered construction, in close communion with Jesus, who is the true Holy of Holies. This reaches its culmination in the Eucharistic liturgy, in which the “ecclesia” that is, the community of baptized finds itself again united to listen to the Word of God and nourish itself on the Body and Blood of Christ. Gathered around this twofold table, the Church of living stones builds herself up in truth and in love and is moulded interiorly by the Holy Spirit, transforming herself into what she receives, conforming herself ever more to her Lord Jesus Christ. She herself, if she lives in sincere and fraternal unity, thus becomes a spiritual sacrifice pleasing to God.

Dear friends, today’s feast celebrates an ever current mystery: that God desires to build himself a spiritual temple in the world, a community that adores him in spirit and truth (cf. Jn 4: 23-24). But this occasion reminds us also of the importance of the concrete buildings in which the community gathers together to celebrate God’s praises. Every community therefore has the duty to carefully guard their holy structures, which constitute a precious religious and historical patrimony. For this we invoke the intercession of Mary Most Holy, so that she might help us to become, like her, a “house of God”, living temple of his love.

Here we are – For help in preparing the kids, let’s go to one of my favorite sources – this wonderful old Catholic religion textbook.

The short chapter on Pentecost is lovely and helpful.

This volume is for 7th graders.

What I’m struck by here is the assumption that the young people being addressed are responsible and capable in their spiritual journey. They are not clients or customers who need to be anxiously served or catered to lest they run away and shop somewhere else.

What is said to these 12 and 13-year olds is not much different from what would have been said to their parents or grandparents. God created you for life with him. During your life on earth there are strong, attractive temptations to shut him out and find lasting joy in temporal things. It’s your responsibility to do your best to stay close to Christ and let that grace live within you, the grace that will strengthen you to love and serve more, the grace that will lead you to rest peacefully and joyfully in Christ.

(The book is structured around the virtues. Each section begins with an event from Scripture that illustrates one of those virtues, followed by stories of people and events from church history that do so as well)

This hasn’t been published in a book – yet – but it’s a painting by Ann Engelhart, illustrator of several books, including four with my writing attached – all listed here. It’s a painting of the tradition of dropping rose petals through the oculus in the Pantheon in Rome.

Finally, hopefully today you’ll be hearing/singing/praying Veni Creator Spiritus today. I have a chapter on it in The Words We Pray.A sample:

The president of the United States is the chief officer of the federal bureaucracy, the head of one branch of a government that has three co-equal branches. Strictly speaking, it is not given to him even to make law, but only to see to the enforcement of the laws passed by Congress (and maybe to veto one here and there) and to appoint appropriate people, like the former CEO of Carl’s Jr., to high federal offices. In the legislative branch, the House of Representatives is the accelerator and the Senate is the brake; the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are pretty much all brake; the presidency is a kind of hybrid, sometimes pressing for needful reform and action, sometimes standing in Congress’s way when it is rash or overly ambitious. The architecture of our constitutional order is a complicated and delicate balance.

But the president is not the tribune of the plebs. He is not a sacred person or the holder of a sacred office. He is neither pontifex nor imperator. He is not the spiritual distillation of the republic or the personification of our national ideals and values. (Thank God Almighty.) He is not even primus inter pares like the chief justice of the Supreme Court or the Patriarch of Constantinople. He is the commander-in-chief in time of war (which, since we have abandoned the advice of Washington and Eisenhower, is all of the time, now) and the chief administrator of the federal bureaucracy. That is it.

As I detail in full footnoted glory in my book out soon, Common Core’s own founding documents specifically invite federal involvement. Its success as a national program is directly attributable to federal involvement in education, period. Common Core’s creators and funders worked hand-in-glove with the Obama administration, right down to transferring personnel and regular alignment phone calls, to impose it upon the nation and link it to every major federal and state education policy (data collection, teacher preparation and certification, school rating systems, curriculum, testing). The new law replacing No Child Left Behind codifies the federal government as the ultimate review board for state testing and curriculum policies, a Clinton-era policy that made Common Core possible.

I have so many notes headed “PF” with many words attached, but since every day brings a new development, what I was sure was most important yesterday inevitably fades with the dawn of a new day, every day, without fail.

It can be no surprise, then, that the sacraments are under renewed attack. For the sacraments are the means by which the Church is ordered and by which she distinguishes, on a practical level, between good and evil. (What is the point of forbidding the evil of divorce, if not to uphold the good of marriage and its witness to the covenant of our salvation? What is the point of forbidding suicide and euthanasia, if not to uphold the sanctity of life and the good of honoring the Lord and Giver of Life?) The sacraments, of course, are much more than that. They are instruments of grace by which God communicates to us his own life through participation in our Lord Jesus Christ. They are not rewards for goodness, but the means of sharing in the God who is good. That is why they are holy sacraments, and it is their very holiness that makes them the object of attack.

Earlier this week, I finished La Dolce Vita Confidential– if you’re interested in Italian pop culture and the movies, you’ll enjoy this. The writing was excellent, and Levy does a great job of excavating a cultural moment and helping us see how these moments just don’t happen – there are streams that are flowing that join to make the river…and then disperse again. For just a few years, Italy was everything, and then it was England’s moment and so life goes on.

There were a few more rabbit holes inspired by the text – various other movies, a purported, but false Marian apparition and this song:

Levy just mentions it offhand, as being inspired by the death/perhaps suicide of a Sicilian nobleman, who jumped/was pushed from a building on Via Veneto. I found it mesmerizing and haunting:

Who could it be,

that man in a tailcoat?

Bonne nuit, bonne nuit, goodnight,

he keeps telling everything,

the lighted lamps,

a cat in love

that goes by wandering.

Now dawn has finally come,

lamps are turned off,

and the whole city

wakes up little by little,

moon has got stuck,

suprised, pale,

it will disappear in the sky

fading away.

A window yawns

on the silent river

and in the white light

a top hat, a flower and a tailcoat

float away.

Gently floating,

cradled by the waves,

he slowly flows down

under bridges towards the sea,

towards the sea he goes.

Who could it be, who could it be,

that man in a tailcoat?

Adieu, adieu, farewell world,

farewell to memories of the past,

to a dream never dreamt,

to an instant of love

that will never come back.

…and then further rabbit holes led me to the fact that the singer/songwriter was Domenio Modugno whose main claim to fame was the Eurovision-competing (but not winning) Volare! which we all know from the car and the commercials, (very funny to watch that commercial and see the boat that’s touted as a fabulous new “small car”) if not from the many covers of the song, including one by Dean Martin, but honestly, take a look at the video, read the borderline surreal lyrics and understand why the Internet is both the life and the death of me.

In the chapter titled “The History of Septuagesima,” Dom Guéranger added, “The Church, therefore, has instituted a preparation for the holy time of Lent. She gives us the three weeks of Septuagesima, during which she withdraws us, as much as may be, from the noisy distractions of the world, in order that our hearts may be the more readily impressed by the solemn warning she is to give us, at the commencement of Lent, by marking our foreheads with ashes.”

The following will be rather mindless because I’ve just spend five hours at an academic competition (going on to nationals in June! Joy.) which stressed this introvert out, but I have work to finish up tomorrow morning, so I want to knock this out tonight….

Yes, I’ve been doing some work this week, and it’s kind of odd and refreshing because the work isn’t a Big Project. It’s a small project that I should be able to knock off in a few days, and I will, but one that still stretches me just a bit because it is, indeed, small.

It’s more challenging to write succinctly and meaningfully than you might think. But it’s my favorite kind of challenge.

The other project I’m working on involves seeing if a collection of talks from a conference can be shaped into a book. We’ll see….

Speaking of talks…I have one! Now that everyone is getting older, I’ve started accepting speaking invitations again..the next one will be an inservice/retreat thingy for Catholic school teachers a couple of hours away, and I’m looking forward to it. Also, Ann Engelhart and I will be speaking up on Long Island somewhere in early June…more on that when they finish up the PR materials.

Tuesday night, I read the novel The Risen by Ron Rash. It was the most interesting-looking book on the “fiction new releases” shelf at the library. It was short – really, probably novella-length, and it was a good way to spend a couple of hours. The plot involved two brothers, and an incident that had happened almost fifty years before with a teenaged girl. I kept thinking of Rectify as I read, since a long-ago crime involving a teenage female victim is at the heart of that, too.

The fundamental issue at hand was….how can we even try to compensate for the wrong that we have done? What is the relationship between the wrong things and the good that we do with our lives later? Does one cancel out the other – in either direction? A knotty problem, indeed. Artfully written, yes, and it certainly held my attention for a couple of hours and moved me a bit in the end, but at the same time there was a mannered aspect about it that ultimately left me cold. Well, not cold, but cooler than I feel I should have been left.

Drifting about at the library the other day, I picked up a book of Maugham stories. Took it home, and read On the Internet that the one with the most startling titles, “The Hairless Mexican,” was considered one of Maugham’s best. So I read it, could see the “twist” about 2/3 of the way through, and then felt that the “twist” could have been handled much more subtly. As in…the hammer wasn’t necessary. So that was enough of that.

This was on the “new releases” shelf, too, so I had to grab it. As of this writing, I’m only about 60 pages in, but am thoroughly enjoying it, and not just Because Rome. I read a lot of social history and history of pop culture, and so far, this is one of the best. One of the flaws of modern writing on these matters is the authorial voice is usually way too intrusive, presuming that the reason we’re reading this book is that we’re super interested in the author’s relationship to the subject matter, when honestly guys, we’re not. This is free of that narcissism, and is quite enjoyable and briskly, yet solidly written. Full report next week.

Miss McKenzie! She found love! So exciting. Okay, not exciting. But a very satisfying read, even though none of her suitors, even the one she eventually accepted, were worthy of her. I’ve decided to immerse myself in Trollope for a time. What I find interesting and instructive is the forthrightness of the issues at hand – namely the restrictions and limitations in which the characters live, mostly financial in nature. We like to think that in our day, we make our choices freely, constrained only by our own lack of self-worth or society’s failure to accept us as we are. None of this in Trollope: your choices are limited, clearly, by how much money and property you have and by your gender. This is your life, as it is. What will you make of it? Very thought-provoking.

In the chapter titled “The History of Septuagesima,” Dom Guéranger added, “The Church, therefore, has instituted a preparation for the holy time of Lent. She gives us the three weeks of Septuagesima, during which she withdraws us, as much as may be, from the noisy distractions of the world, in order that our hearts may be the more readily impressed by the solemn warning she is to give us, at the commencement of Lent, by marking our foreheads with ashes.”

Yeah, spending an hour or so here. Older Kid has an exam, and it’s his only one today, I had to drive (I usually don’t in the mornings, but other kid in the carpool didn’t have an exam this first period), it makes no sense to go back home, so here I am. Coffee shop? Well, I don’t drink coffee, and I didn’t feel like spending $4 on a mug of tea, so here I am with my Diet Coke.

I’ve got an article on the novelSilence over at Catholic World Report. It’s intended to help folks who are reading the novel for the first time. I had said a couple of weeks ago I would do a study guide, and I would still like to do that, but I’m not sure it’s going to happen. I have a book manuscript due February 1, and really, every spare minute I have needs to go to that, especially with the holidays here and the next couple of weeks about to vanish, in work terms, like smoke. It’s weird how that happens, and it happens every year: mid-December, I’m thinking, “Eh, I’ve got almost two months to finish this,” and then I wake up one morning, it’s early January and I’ve got like three weeks.

But I will say that if you want a deeper look at the novel, consider findingSilence and Beautyby Japanese Christian visual artist Makoto Fujimura. It’s a meditative read, and really helped me understand the novel and the Japanese cultural context out of which Endo wrote.

I read an annoyed tweet from a priest about Silence, objecting to “why do I have to read a book that celebrates apostasy?” Of course, Silence doesn’t do that, although it’s not hard to see how it could be interpreted that way, which is why it’s a good discussion-starter and conscience-pricker. Secondly, who says anyone has to read anything? Today everyone on my social media feeds is talking about the new Star Wars movie and I could NOT care less, but I feel no compunction to enter into the fray, and don’t feel annoyed about it. I just do my own thing. Not a problem, not a reason to get annoyed.

I think a great part of staying sane in this era of information is just understanding that people are different, have varied interests and yes, obsessions, and just because a substantial part of subcultures you bump up against over the course of a day are really interested in something..doesn’t mean you have to be..or that you have to disparage them for their interests.

It’s pretty amazing, and I’m actually sort of proud. As I said to Ann Engelhart on the phone the other day about it, We did this thing. It’s a little tradition that is spreading, bit by bit, and something we did has inspired a lot of it over on this side of the ocean. She gets most of the credit, because the book was her idea, and I’m grateful!

My younger son, the pianist, is a scholarship winner and member of the honors ensemble of his arts academy. In return for the scholarship, they are asked to play in a few special recitals through the year. Over the past couple of weeks, he played in two at a local retirement home/assisted living facility. He had two pieces, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” I have a bit of the latter on Instagram here. That is one of the few secular Christmas songs that I like, mostly because of the historical context – written during World War II, with the original “narrator” of the song understood to be a soldier serving overseas. When you get that, that last line…I’ll be home for Christmas…if only in my dreams…just might *get* you a bit. And when your son is playing it for an audience of 80-90 year olds who’ve hobbled from their rooms with their walkers, bringing a lifetime of family, home, children and memories with them, and probably not much more time to go…yeah.

Speaking of Memento Mori, this is last week’s estate sale shot. The house was filthy, in terrible shape, making me wonder, as I always do in such situations, if the person living there had been just stubborn and not ever wanted any help (that happens), had alienated everyone who might help (that happens) or had been basically abandoned by those who should have been around to help (that happens too). As usual, the experience confirms my determination to not let that happen…